Chattanooga's student academic aces compete in Vegas

Chattanooga's student academic aces compete in Vegas

Jessica Tolbert, a senior at the Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences, works on a charcoal sketch in her Brainerd home. She is one of seven area students heading to Las Vegas to compete in the NAACP's ACT-SO program, similar to an academic olympics.

On Chattanooga's Tunnel Boulevard, where gunfire is common and crime abounds, lives an award-winning young artist.

"Every now and then you hear guns and sirens," says 17-year-old Jessica Tolbert. "I keep focusing on my future."

Jessica is one of seven Chattanooga students who traveled to Las Vegas this week to compete against more than 600 other teens in the NAACP's national academic Olympics, called ACT-SO.

This is the first year Chattanooga has taken this many students to the national competition.

Top winners get up to $5,000 and a laptop or tablet computer. Just as important as winning is the exposure teens get from participating, said local ACT-SO Chairman Vincent Phipps, who is accompanying the students to the competition.

The students left Thursday to fly more than 1,670 miles to Las Vegas for competition on Saturday.

Jessica knows firsthand about the benefits gained from exposure. She won top art student in the country at the 2013 ACT-SO competition. In addition to getting $2,000 for first place, several people offered her thousands to purchase her winning piece. She didn't sell it there because she had promised it to the local Craniofacial Foundation.

Phipps said actors Tatyana Ali and Blair Underwood; first lady Michelle Obama; singer Alicia Keys, rapper Kanye West and surgeon Dr. Ben Carson are among the influential people who have attended the ACT-SO competition in the past seven years.

Young black adults need to see that there are other intelligent, talented, focused young people and that it is cool to be smart and care about your future, Phipps said.

ACT-SO -- an acronym for Afro-Academic Cultural, Technological, and Scientific Olympics -- allows them to see a world where hundreds of black students excel in school and in their talent.